Anne vs The Medievalists Chapter Two
by Blackbirdwrite
Summary: The morning after Anne's attack by Rawson's thug, two things are burning in her mind: Get even with Rawson and get back with Miss Walker. Great thanks go to my fandom friend, LovingAnneLister, who brought insightful dramatic ideas to this story. Please enjoy, Blackbird


Shidben Hall - Anne Lister's bedroom -Upstairs

It's early morning, and the sun streams through my bedroom windows, and I wonder if all people who have eastern-facing windows are early risers? They'd have to be, wouldn't they? The kind who bounce up out of bed at first light ready for anything.

Ordinarily, that is me, but today, only one of my eyes makes it all the way open. I lean in closer to the mirror and carefully prise open my left lid. Through the lightning-like pattern of a bloodshot hemorrhage, my eye looks back with a singular message: Get even.

Downstairs, beginning with my family at breakfast, I'll tell them plausible lies and dismiss their prying —this time to explain away my brutalized face. However, I'm likely to be interrupted from further deception by the inevitable arrival of a note from Miss Walker, probably appearing around nine, inquiring about the Rev. Ainsworth's departure and did I, perhaps, know anything about it?

Should I tell her yes after deceiving her about so many things? Would she like to know how many former lovers I have from here to Spain? Or perhaps, she'd rather hear how many women before her I've asked to marry me? Should I tell her that toying with me —like she's been doing in this hellish back and forth —has eaten away at my heart whole because only a broken aching thing would satisfy its ghoulish appetites?

Should I tell her how insane it makes me that my love life resembles a battlefield because I'm at war with surrender? I cannot lose another woman I love to yet, another man. So, yes! For the love of God, yes! I horsewhipped him because he forced himself upon her, and it was mine and mine alone to do it. Might she say thank you for protecting her from such filth? Might any of her idiotic relations?

Is there any way back with Ann or have I failed to catch her? I stifle a cry of pain while removing my dressing gown to splash water on my face. I know the minds of the medievalists in Miss Walker's family —they are jealous of me. I should have seen it before now.

For miles and miles in any direction, I'm the only one in this valley having sex. Miss Walker, of course, is also having sex, and until very recently I could walk over there, and twenty minutes later she'd be on my lap for the afternoon. However, that seems in grave jeopardy now that the medievalists are controlling her mind with witches and demons and hangman's ropes.

What to do about them? My possible in-laws. Hmm.

I hear Cordingly's voice after her three quick raps at my bedroom door. "Ma'am?" She asks.

"Come in, Cordingly. I'd much rather you today than Eugenie."

"Thank you, ma'am. May I get you anything before we start dressing you?"

"You'll keep this between us. No one else." When she nods her head, I reveal the long spread of black and blue bruises down my ribs and how impossible it would be for me to wear a corset today.

She sneaks a glance or two at my face. "Out of your eye, ma'am, can you see very much today?"

"Well enough to not fall off any more walls." I reiterate my cover story.

"Very good, ma'am," Cordingly says as she gently smoothes an ointment over my bruises and wraps soft cotton around my torso.

This is not the first secret kept between us. Cordingly was my ladies maid on my sojourn to Paris when I first met Mrs. Barlow and soon began courting her. How I convinced Maria Barlow of my virginity -and seem to have convinced Ann Walker of the same -is curious to me that each woman suspected me of any such innocence. Do I appear chaste? The very thought frightens me.

Once I let it slip in front of Mrs. Barlow while reading a letter back from my Aunt Anne, that I had a venereal disease and was in Paris searching for doctors and seeking a cure. This did not seem to shock Mrs. Barlow after she'd known me for several months. And in no time she had given me the name of a medical specialist, whose heavy metal "cures" of mercury sulfates nearly killed me. Dying, diseased, or not, and without fail, I held up my end for many hours whenever she stayed with me for the night. Now, that it appears I have all kinds of not-having-a-relationship time on my hands, I should re-read my Paris diary during my time spent there.

There were three kind things Maria Barlow did for me. All have been long-lasting, but the one that set me on my much-needed life track adjustment was when I finally felt, oh this sounds so stupid, safe enough to ask a stylish woman to help me shop for a different look I wanted to have. I needed couture Parisian black attire and fast. The urgency of this fell upon the scheme between me and a Resistance spy about the beheading of the former Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, and a beautiful ballet dancer I had a crush on.

By this point in my sojourn to Paris, Mrs. Barlow had taken to calling me 'her beau' and had described me to myself, as having a handsome, gentlemanly manner about me. If a woman was going to speak to me like that while kissing me in a dark passageway, I figured I could trust her with my efforts to improve my appearance.

Naturally, she was an excellent guide as we went here and there to shops of her friends in search of all-black Parisian couture. I was confident I wasn't making this change because Mariana had described me as looking shabby before giving me syphilis I think as a way of controlling me sexually, but that is a whole other story.

Even Mrs. Barlow had said my cuffs were a bit frayed, but with her, I did not take offense like I did with Mariana and it was because of the way Mrs. Barlow had said it to me. Gently and kind.

We started my transition slowly. We began with scarfs — chocolate-brown ones, midnight blue ones and, of course, black ones. We shared a kiss while Maria tied and untied silk from around my neck, and the owner was discreetly absent. I was enthralled with all her attention.

Looking in a mirror, I matched jeweled stick pins with my new scarfs whilst Maria stood behind me, resting her chin on my shoulder. "May I make one more suggestion?" She'd asked.

"Hmmm," I replied, feeling her hand on my waist, and then it sliding down to caress my thighs and her pressing her body and breasts against my back. Unless I ask, usually, I would not say I like touching, but this was happening in public, fast, and it aroused me terribly. Of course, I said, "Please ask."

"Perhaps you've noticed that no one in Paris has one long eyebrow. Let people see that you have two."

I'd looked into the mirror, and it did appear that I had one long eyebrow, unlike everyone else who had two, It would make me look more reasonable. I was willing to do it.

Before I'd left Paris for England with fine new clothes, two eyebrows and a lingering lover's crush on Mrs. Barlow, she and I had agreed to marry in two years if we were still single and cared for each other as life partners. Looking back, I think much of what went on between us was an intense mind game that played out on the streets of Paris, in the salon at Place Vendôme, and finally, when we moved in together, at the Voltaire. By then, it was night after night of passion. Maria Barlow was an older, very ladylike widow and I was in my mid-thirties. In Paris, in 1825, I had the best sex of my life.

"Cordingly," I ask, looking away from the mirror having decided that before breakfast is the time to break my nose back into form. "Can you get me several rolls of cotton? You know the kind you use for a nosebleed. Something to stick right up your nostril," I say while making a shoving motion that unnerves her and she flinches at my idea and hurries from my bedroom.

Once I'm alone, I put the spine of a volume of poetry against the right side of my nose and pick up a hefty tortoiseshell hairbrush to smack the left side back into place.

This method I do not recommend trying at home, but when the bleeding had finally stopped, and I no longer saw double, Cordingly managed enough tape and cotton that I felt I wouldn't bleed freely on myself, for at least part of the day.

If I keep telling myself it's only a bad headache, and surely by tomorrow I'll be a nose-breather again, I think I can make it down the hill to where Pickles and his crew are building something for me.

As predicted, everyone in my family acts strangely around me during breakfast, when a note from Miss Walker arrived inquiring if I had any first-hand news about what happened to Mr. Ainsworth on his way out of town. If so, she was summoning my presence, at my earliest convenience, to discuss the matter.

The head of steam I've gotten under me —solely fueled by broken-nose pain —may be short-lived. I incline to check in on Pickles building my stacking stone walls. Each piece chiseled out of the quarries at Shibden.

I find the wall under construction after a ten-minute walk. Now that I've examined them, how nicely the stone pieces are balanced and fitted together, I'm certain of it. Still standing a thousand years from now will be my ornamental walk that meanders alongside the boundaries of an ancient Roman road I discovered on one of Shibden's hillsides.

It's going to be beautiful.

After congratulating Pickles and his men on what an excellent job they're doing, I flip open my pocket watch and see that it's half-past ten.

I can't put off seeing Miss Walker any longer.

Twenty minutes later —

Crow's Nest

"I've gotten a note," I say to James while draping my coat over his arm and handing him my hat and gloves. "Where is she?"

Once I'm inside the library, I see Miss Walker looking out the French doors at Miss Parkhill, off in the garden painting a watercolor of a marble statue and its surrounding hedge. My relief at catching Miss Walker alone is immeasurable.

Ann takes one look at my bruised eye and swollen nose and gasps. "I didn't imagine for one second that Mr. Ainsworth would fight back. Are you all right?"

I let out such a sigh of relief that I levitate slightly off the floor and forward into her arms. "This? No, not him."

"Who then?" She asks a bit shaken.

"Ann, I don't believe you'd know him. He's not the sort you would know."

"But you would?"

Nervously, I pull at my collar. "For two minutes, I knew him. It was business."

She kisses me lightly, mindful of my busted lip. "What kind of business? Anne, you do look hurt."

I take both her wrists and pull her to me tighter. With enthusiasm, I say, "Let's ride over to Shibden and have a look at something I'm building. We could take your carriage and be there and back in no time. What'd you say? Lovely day and all?"

"I like the idea of stopping off at the Moss House," she says while ringing the bell to rouse James and send word to the groom. And now that you've mentioned carriages," she turns to me for my answer. "I'd like the truth from you, Anne."

Despite the pain it causes me, I beat my fist against my chest. "Do you not understand why physically I had to do it?"

"Anne, why couldn't you just let him leave?"

"Because you are mine to protect and he molested you."

Still holding the servant's bell, she collapses onto the couch. When I approach her, she begins to cry.

"I've never had anyone like you in my life. Can you understand? My family, they think they're helping, but they're not."

I drop down on the cushion next to her and catch her tears as they fall. "Ann, you mustn't listen to them. They're medievalists who don't understand anything about love and passion, and because of it, they stay miserable all their lives. I'm always going to be here for you and put your best interests first and love you always."

"Why?" She asks, continuing to cry. "Why would you stay when I've treated you so terribly?"

And before I could stop her, she leaves the couch and nervously paces on the other side of the room.

The distance between us feels dangerous. The floor a trap of quicksand. How to stop it? How to stop it!

I leap up from the couch and quite literally shout across the room at her, "God knows! Can you not see how much I love you?"

At that instant, James appears in the doorway, looking confused. "Ma'am?" He asks, as evenly as he can muster.

Ann Walker begins to laugh. "James, we'll be needing the carriage."

Ignoring James, I continue to shout emphatically, "That is why I had to do it! It was mine to do." I look up to gauge her reaction and see the butler instead of Ann staring at me with a worried look on his face.

Then I taste it. The blood in my mouth. I press my handkerchief to my nose, and immediately it turns red.

Ann turns to James. "Two things before you go. Miss Lister will need some bandages, very quickly, and the cook should make a lunch basket. Thank you, James." Then she turns to me, "Should I send for Dr. Kenny?"

While pressing my handkerchief harder against my broken nose, I study myself in the mirror while waving her suggestion away, "I can very well care for myself, without that quack fluttering over me."

"Why do you dislike him so?" She asks as James shuts the door behind him.

"Ann? If I'd been allowed, what kind of a doctor do you think I would have been? Better than him, surely."

She appears in the mirror's reflection behind me and turns me around to look at her. "Probably a very good one," she says, stroking my cheek, "with a gentle, loving bedside manner."

Amazed by whatever miracle is happening, I kiss her as hard as I can without bleeding.


End file.
